While scavenged old cans and some foraged berries will keep you alive, cooked food will help you live your best life. Hunting and farming will give you access to quality ingredients and keep that supply coming.

In this blogpost, we'll outline the cooking features in Yugopunk and show you how foraging, farming and hunting come together to not only help your character survive, but thrive.

The Good Old Grill

The first cooking station available to you is just plopping down some cinderblocks with a metal mesh and calling it a Grill. Early on, you'll need it to cook the first meat that you hunt, and you can grill some vegetables on it too. It also lets you prepare one of the Balkan classics: Čevapi!

While grilling is the simplest form of cooking, it's pretty hands-on. If you don't pay attention and pick the food up quickly once it's done, it will burn. The Grill gives you visual and audio cues to let you know when it's ready.

A Cooking Device: Cooking Station

When you get your bearings and get around to establishing a base, you should build your first Cooking Station, which unlocks more complex recipes. Select from a list of recipes you have available and have the ingredients for, then watch as they cook in the pot and pop out as a finished meal.

The Cooking Station also plays a large part in preserving food and making water safe to drink and cook with.

Water Purification

Whatever happened in the world of Yugopunk before you came has left most water sources contaminated, which is why you need to filter or boil it first. The Cooking Station has two pots: one for your dirty water and one to keep the clean water that's used for cooking and drinking.

The Cooking Station also allows you to make warm beverages like teas and coffee, which give you extra buffs. You can brew a lot of teas from various plants that you forage, and each has its own buff that makes it worth it, like increasing your stamina, healing or just warmth.

Preserve What You Reap

Food in the game spoils if left on its own, and refrigeration, at least in the early stages, is very limited. Cooking extends that time. Some meals will still spoil relatively quickly, but you can also use cooking for preservation. Things like Kompot, Ajvar, Pindjur and Berry Jam will keep for a long time even without refrigeration.

While most survival games let you make generic foods, we decided to focus on actual dishes that are a large part of Balkan culture. We're working on adding recipes that have been passed on to us and our peers by Balkan grandmothers from various backgrounds.

Benefits of Cooked Meals

While preserving food and feeding yourself are the main goals of cooking, the real bonus is the buffs meals give you, as well as feeding you for longer with the same resources.

Well Fed is a buff you get when both your food and hydration meters are very high, and it comes with a lot of extra benefits. It's worth taking some time to prepare good meals to take with you out on a roam through the wilderness and ruins.

Fatness

As characters feed themselves or fail to do so, their body weight will fluctuate visibly. You start out in the middle of the Fatness scale. Eating on its own won't directly affect it, but keeping your character's food and hydration meters very high will slowly tick your body weight up, and when they bottom out it will tick the other way.

When it gets high, you get an Obese status, which reduces your stamina but raises your armor and cold resistance. When it gets low, you get an Underweight status, which reduces your max health but gives you extra stamina and heat resistance. This gives you another way to optimize your character build.

What We're Working On

The cooking system is functional, and we're planning to build on it:

• Expanded Cooking Features – more stations that are faster, more efficient and tied into our electrical systems, plus specialized stations for specific foods and drinks, and more recipes to cook.

• Cooking Skill – a skill that determines the speed and quality of the food you create, so someone on your team can become a dedicated cook for the whole group. Remember to thank your Base Mom!

• Brewing and Distillation – alcoholic beverages, from beer and wine to harder stuff like rakija and other strong spirits.

• Buffs – more buffs from foods and drinks, and balancing them as we test.

Thank you for following the development of Yugopunk. For updates, previews, and behind-the-scenes content, follow us on our social channels or sign up for the newsletter.

If you haven't already, wishlist Yugopunk on Steam. It helps more than you'd think, and it means you'll know the moment the game is ready.

Until next time,

Sunbox Games